


Braconid

by JenniNova



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beforus, Gen, Grubs, Lusii, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:00:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniNova/pseuds/JenniNova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damara Megido, the Handmaid, was away from Beforus for only a blink of an eye, but when she returned she was changed.  Angry, violent, sabotaging.  This is a glimpse of what made her that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Braconid

                Green, so much green, Damara’s entire existence was green, so much that her eyes glazed over and details faded away.  The room she was occasionally allowed to retreat to contained a pink furniture set that gave her reprieve from the monotony, but even though she was told it was where she would sleep, no cocoon was ever provided.  Maddened by sleep deprivation and unending sameness, she wondered if puking would improve the décor. 

                As the damnable Cue Ball entered the room, a checkerboarded miniature planet appeared above his working table.  He didn’t leave his work in the room with her anymore—she had once smashed one of the planets with a green chair and set his work back a week.

                “I would much appreciate if you would drop the disrespect so we might get to work,” said Doc Scratch.

                “You can go fuck yourself,” was what she intended to say, but of course barely-structured gibberish fell from her lips instead.

                “I think,” Scratch continued without acknowledging her, “I have come across a better theory than those so far provided by simple sociology.  I think we need to focus instead on the population of lusus naturae.  The connection they make with troll subjects is mystifying, but I think able to be manipulated.  We may have to start toying with the trolls’ bodily structure as well, but I’m not sure yet.  This is all brainstorming, of course.  Even with templates and your temper which continually hampers our work, it takes time to craft the components.”

                For ages and eras and eternities, Scratch had been sending her to different troll planets.  He made large and small changes at his table, then sent her in for the fine-tuning—at least that was how he put it.  He had snatched her up from Beforus moments before their victory, made it clear how much power he had over Damara’s mind and body by continually reading her thoughts and forcing her into action that her thinkpan rebelled against.  He kept her time-changing powers for himself completely.  With prodding, bribing, control, promises, he kept her relatively compliant.  Every time he pulled her from one of his failed fucking experiments, she railed against him.  Sometimes he had a new reality already prepared for her to jump into, where she was expected to push players into position and into action.  When she smashed one planet, much of her bodily control was taken from her as a punishment.  When she attempted to stab Scratch with her hairpins, he created a bedroom and grounded her.  When she went into one of his experiments and began immediately proclaiming his intentions, revealing the Game’s purpose and what would happen to all the trolls and rallying them against their invisible enemy, Scratch pulled her home, made her watch carefully as he slowly destroyed that place, and then caused all of her words to come out in some strange language. Except she was pretty sure it wasn’t even a language.  She was pretty sure it was just stupid shit.

                This time there had been a long while between his experiments.  Sociology.  Of course with Damara being unable to speak with her people, it had proven difficult for her to take up being a prophet or an advisor or a guardian or any other role that she had used to manipulate others.  Scratch probably had to come up with new ways to play the Game, different ways for her to interact with the timeline.  Her guts seized with new fear as she put those thoughts together.

                Scratch took his blessedly white jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair so he could work.  Damara reached into a pocket and stole one of his cigarettes.  She never saw him smoking—not sure how he physically could—but they were always there, and he never seemed to mind that she took them.  She lit one up and inhaled deeply, quelling the nausea for the moment.  Doc Scratch prodded at the floating orb with its novel geography, waved a hand over its surface, spun it around.  Damara’s eyelids felt heavy as she watched him work out of lack of any other activity.  Why the fuck couldn’t he snag her a cocoon off any one of those meaningless little worlds instead of pulling in some bullshit flat couch from who knows where?

                “So,” he broke the silence, “the lusus is a more complicated being than I imagined.  They resist change a lot more than the trolls do, you see.  So now the question, dear girl, is whether to adapt the trolls to our purpose, or the lusus population.”  Damara waited for a follow-up comment, but Scratch was silent again.  He never murmured or stuttered; everything he spoke was precisely what he intended Damara to hear.

                She watched him for a while, but his movements were inscrutable.  She watched the ember on her cigarette for a while, tapped the ashes into a neat pile and tried to play a game of Sudoku.  She pulled the pack out to continue to supply ashes for the numbers as she went.  Nearly done, she realized that one of her initial numbers had been misplaced, and the game had been unwinnable before she started.  She wiped the ash away with a low growl.

                There was an odd grinding noise as Doc Scratch straightened his back, and the planet began to slowly rotate above the table.  “Dear Damara, I believe this one is ready for your intervention.  As always, our aim is to Scratch this session after the Game is underway.  I will direct your time travels and inform you of our goals in each place.”  He ignored her grinding a practically new cigarette into his desk as he spoke.  “We’re going to begin in the brooding caverns so that you might get a grasp on the changes I’ve made.”

                With that, she felt her time travel powers kick in without her consent, the horrible green room rushed and fled, and soon she stood on grey sand, crimson rock climbing from the landscape before her.  At the entrance to the brooding caverns stood a jadeblood—one of the many constants between these worlds.  She watched Damara approach warily, most likely prepared for a fight to defend the grubs.  Damara kept her head lowered and her posture nonthreatening.

                “Stingless,” said the jadeblood.

                “I’m sorry.  I don’t know what you mean by that, and I’m here to most likely end you and everything you hold dear.  Please, strike me down.  Kill me now, if you know what’s good for everyone here.”  But of course that awful not-language came out instead.  The jadeblood smiled in a sort of pitying way and held a hand out.  Damara reached and took it, playing her part without hesitation after so many years, wishing for this all to just be over.  She just wanted to get into the Game, do her best to Scratch the session, grasp at her one last hope to be free of that awful Cue Ball and his mind-numbingly green everything.

                In a slightly higher-pitched voice, the jadeblood guardian said, “Do you want to see the babies?  There’s a new brood emerging now that I’m about to tend to.  I’ll bet if you’re good, you can help us too, Stingless.”

                “Your hand is the first friendly touch I’ve experienced in years and I may just hate you for it,” Damara replied in a sweet, dumb voice.

                “You’re a rustblood, right?  I can tell from your eyelashes and your flat teeth.  Come through here, I’ll show you where we tend the rustbloods while they’re assigned to their lusus.”

                Inside the mouth of the cave, gentle white light made the stone walls shine more burgundy than outside, and the grey sand was softer.  The guardian guided her through twisted tunnels, a large thoroughfare where other trolls walked with purpose, down a couple different branches, and ended at a metal grate.  Inside was a long-flanked white creature with spiraled horns, pressed against a wall away from the grate.  Damara’s breath caught and her eyes welled up.  It was like a mirror image of her own lusus. 

                A call came from down the halls, echoing so much that Damara couldn’t make it out.  “Oh, here come the grubs, they’re bringing them now,” said Damara’s companion excitedly.

                Footsteps approached, and Damara turned to watch a guy pushing a big cart full of little squirmy, ruddy grubs up to the grate.  Odd.  These little grubs waved tiny black daggerpoints on their rears.  She peeked behind the jadeblood and saw a longer, more menacing black spike in the folds of her robes.  The one who had pushed the cart walked away, and a shiny black stinger emerged near the base of his spine as well.  Ah, that’s why she was Stingless.

                The jadeblood opened the metal grate and pulled the cart in, motioning for Damara to follow, then closed the gate again.  The lusus trembled at their entry, its eyes rolling in every direction for escape.  How, Damara wondered, would one lusus possibly be able to provide for all these young ones?

                The guardian carefully reached into the pile of grubs and extracted one.  It opened its barely-formed eyes, glanced around before settling on Damara’s face, and gave her a tiny smile.  The jadeblood smoothed its black hair affectionately, then approached the lusus.  It crawled back and forth urgently, searching for escape but finding none.  The jadeblood set a foot on it to hold the lithe creature in place, then bent down.

                “No,” Damara whispered, the word leaving her lips as intended.  The guardian positioned the grub above the lusus, then plunged the stinger into its white flesh.  It yelped in terror and scrabbled at the sand but found no purchase.  The grub settled in with a cherubic yawn and closed its eyes. 

                The lusus’ feet went still and its wild eyes half-closed.  Before it completely stopped moving, the jadeblood turned back to the cart, picked up another grub, then stabbed that stinger into the lusus’ hide next to the first.  The lusus only huffed weakly this time.

                Damara tried to back away, hit the corner of the cart, the grubs began squealing and crying at the shock.  The jadeblood steadied the cart, hushed the grubs.  “Stingless, please, you’re upsetting the little ones.”

                “Sick!  You’re fucking sick, you disgusting bitch!  Shove those horrible grubs up your nook! Stay the fuck away from me!”  She slapped away the offered hand and ran to the metal grate. Fuck, how does it open?  The jadeblood placed a hand on her shoulder, and Damara lashed out again.  She turned her aggression to the lusus, grabbing at the grubs to tear them away.  They had rooted themselves thoroughly, and began to screech and bite at her hands.  Blood began to run down the lusus’s hide, and the jadeblood was screaming for help and grabbing at Damara’s hair.

                Then the familiar time-travel feeling came over her again and the scene fell away.  Green replaced it. Fuck no.  A white orb came into view, and Damara froze in place, waiting to see what punishment would be meted out.

                “Little one, I’ve found a much better idea.  I perused the timeline while you observed, and that one was simply too complicated, not likely to work however we split it.”  The planet on the table crumbled into nothingness behind him.  “What we’re going to do instead is so much simpler.  You see, you’re going to Scratch your own session.  Wasn’t it lucky that we put Beforus aside?  I think we need to play a longer con here.  Let me show you.”  He waved his hand to shunt aside the crumbling planet and something like a screen took its place.  The screen showed a creature like a lusus, but twisted and strange.  It had some sort of beaked mouth, and the rest of it was a horrorterror made lusus, tentacles questing from it like hungry vines. 

                “This, Damara dear, will be our boon.  We just need your session to Scratch so I can insert it properly.  I even think I’ve found a pathway through Beforus’s timeline that would allow it to happen.  But you’re going to have to work at it, Damara.  No playing around with the children anymore.”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first writing in years. I appreciate criticism of all sorts. I understand some parts may not fit quite correctly, but I don't mind since it's supposed to be alternate anyhow. From here I would think Damara would go back to Beforus, be directed through their past to change certain events, and then initiate the Scratch. Everyone dying and being able to "survive" in the dream bubbles, I think, was outside that initial plan, but Doc Scratch's changes stayed in place. At least she's around her old friends long enough that a few have learned how to communicate with her.


End file.
